So how many copies do you have to sell to become a best seller? And how many authors achieve this?
Best Selling Books of 2007: Hardcover, Paperback, Childrens.
One person’s numbers for making #19 on the NY Times list.
The Times on making their list.
What makes someone gifted?
Raw talent?
Sure. An apptitutde for something always helps. But it appears it’s not enough. True expertise takes work. And those trying to help (i.e. parents, teachers, coaches) can hinder if they give the wrong kind of praise.
I wanted to share three articles reporting the results of a number of interesing studies on expertise which often appears as a skill level that seems unobtainable by normal, motivated individuals.
This music school in the Adirondacks has “trained such luminaries as Pinchas Zukerman, Itzhak Perlman, Joshua Bell, Lynn Harrell, and Yo-Yo Ma.” A number of researchers wanted to see what the difference was between the students who seemed most skilled and those who weren’t. They divided students “into three skill levels, including one the faculty had identified as having the best chance of becoming world-class soloists.” Then they looked at the differences.
According to the report, “the results were clear-cut, with little room for any sort of inscrutable God-given talent. The elite musicians had simply practiced far more than the others…Psychologists found a second attribute in elite players that is less obvious than sheer hours of practice. While most of us think of practice as the repetition of tough spots (and this is how many young people do practice), elite musicians, they found, took a different approach.” Read full article.
Why? According to these researchers it’s because so many early-bloomers get warped by their experience and fail to develop perseverance. More here.
It appears that how we praise achievement affects performance. Sometimes in large and startling ways.
You may think that it’s good to praise your child for being “smart” or “good” in some subject. But there’s growing evidence that giving kids such labels doesn’t improve or motivate performance, but actually reduces it.
Psychologist Carol Dweck and her team have studied the effect of praise on students in a variety of settings. “Repeating her experiments, Dweck found this effect of praise on performance held true for students of every socioeconomic class. It hit both boys and girls—the very brightest girls especially (they collapsed the most following failure). Even preschoolers weren’t immune to the inverse power of praise.” So what type of praise actually works? Read here.
We often think genius must be tied to being precocity. After all, Motzart was doing musical flips when he was still a kid. For writers, however, it appears this isn’t the case. More here.
The main role of villains and antagonists in stories is to generate suspense, anxiety, and fear in the reader. They make it possible for us to worry that the hero will not be able to avoid a significant threat or remove a lack. There are other effects–mystery, poignancy (about the human situation like in Les Mis). But those are secondary.
For the main things to happen the villain has to be a credible, significant, and immediate threat…all the way through the book until he or she is smushed or wins.
If he’s not credible, the reader realizes there is no real threat. If the threat is not significant, who cares? If it’s not immediate, again, who cares?
So how do we make a villain like that? We make him or her smart, powerful, a few steps ahead of the hero, and dedicated to doing something we root against (because it’s just plain wrong or because we love our hero and want the best for him and the villain is pitted against him). He has to be able to put the hero on his heels most of the way through the book, and our poor hero is scrambling to adjust.
You can have all sorts of villains–liked by many or few, kooky or calculating, eccentric or plain, noble or sadistic–just as long as they remain significant, immediate, and credible threats. The minute they lose threat status, the game’s over because at that point fear, anxiety, and suspense in the reader vanish.
I’ve had a number of people ask me where I am with the second book. I have the progress bars on the side, but they don’t give any details. So I thought I’d start up a semi-regular post that would be something like a writer’s journal. We’ll see how it goes.
Right now I’m working on the climax of CURSE OF A DARK GOD. For the last two weeks I’ve been struggling trying to figure out the flow. I knew in general what I wanted to have happen. I had some images and the general feel–spectacle, revelation, battle at the fortress–knew I had to fulfill some expectations I’d raised with four characters. But I didn’t know the exact steps of the scene, the back and forth. I also hadn’t figured out the exact details of some of the magic that would be used.
I outlined the objectives and plans of the two opposing warlords and then the steps of the scene. I listed my objectives for the scene. I do this sketching, sometimes exploratory drafts, to help bring the scene to life in my mind. I find that until a scene is alive in my mind, it’s impossible for me to write. Anyway, over the course of two weeks I went through six takes of the scene, and it still didn’t feel right. I won’t give the details and spoil the ending, but it just wasn’t there and I was getting frustrated. I’m behind on my deadlines and a book’s ending it critical. I talked a few things over with Nellie and made some headway, but it just wasn’t there.
So I called a brainstorm meeting. I’ve never done this before for my writing work. I mean, I’ve bounced things off individuals (mostly Nellie) many times and found good resolutions, but I’ve never had a group. However, I felt I needed some extra input to get my mind going down new paths. Lenn Johnson, Amy and Alex Lamborn, and Miles and Becky Pinter came over. I borrowed a white board and easel from my church and made gingersnaps. When they arrived, I sat them around our kitchen table with Nellie and had them riff on one question while I captured their answers and ideas on the white board.
It was incredibly productive. Partly because they came up with some great ideas I’m going to use. But also because it got me thinking in a new way which allowed me to come up with an idea that resolved the main issue I was dealing with. That was last Thursday. The next day I sat down and outlined a scene that did everything I wanted it to, including giving me the “oh, baby” feeling. It feels right. I have the spectacle, the revelation, the fulfillment to the expectations for the characters. I’m excited to write it. Which means I can now move forward. This week and next I hope to finish. After that there are a few small things I need to insert and clean up. Then it’s off to my editor.
BTW, I did some calculations. For those interested, in this draft, the third, I ripped out 50% of the draft two and completely rewrote it. New problem and situation for two of my three points of view, major changes, etc. I heavily revised above 20% of the remaining 50%. I’ve put in a little over 500 hours working on this draft over the last six months.
500 hours (remember, I still have a day job).
I am a slower writer than many. But it still would have been a huge task even if I could write twice as fast as I do. I think this is a perfect illustration of three things. First, if you don’t fix some things you feel are off when you find them, you might find you have a massive amount of rework later. Second, sometimes you don’t recognize you have those issues until you’re well into it. Third, writing requires the author to make time. I think this is the most important one. And the one that probably kills most aspiring writers. The fact is that if you can’t make time, you ain’t going to write 🙂
Speaking of making time as a new artist, watch this interesting interview with author Scott Turow.
Laughs are lovely. I just came across this wonderful parody by novelist Jim C. Hines which will give you a few for free. Enjoy!
Slush I Read
by Jim C. Hines
(Apologies to Seuss)
I read slush.
Slush I read.
That slush I read.
That slush I read!
I do not like that slush I read.
Do you like fanfic with vamps?
I do not like them Mary Sue.
Why do these vamps all worship you?
Here’s a tale from D & D!
I do not want your D & D.
I do not like your elf PC.
I can not stand your purple prose.
I want to punch you in the nose!
Would you like a hot sex scene?
I wrote it for my online ‘zine!
I’ve looked in the crystal ball I hide under my desk and caught a glimpse of what ebooks will change in the next few years. Specifically I saw what will happen to:
After showing me the vision, the ball thanked me for shopping at Walmart. Weird.
PRINT ONLY CONTRACTS
The only reason to have a print publisher is to get distribution you cannot obtain on your own, or to get it more cheaply than it would cost you if you tried to get it on your own. That’s it. Now, it’s true publishers have excellent art departments and story editors. But you can contract out cover art, copy editing, formatting, and even story editing yourself.
Distribution is the main thing publishers offer that you can’t get anywhere else.
BTW, when I’m talking about distribution, I’m talking mostly about getting the books out to places people can see and purchase them. For example, publishers can get your book into hundreds or thousands of books stores all at the same time–Barnes & Noble, Hastings, Walmart, Costco, indie book stores, airport book stores, grocery stores, drug stores, etc. Publishers can get you display in those stores so consumers see your book. One form of that are the racks and new book displays. Another is one that Scholastic does so well, i.e. displaying and selling titles in tens of thousands of classrooms with its book catalogs. A single author just can’t do that.
It’s also true publishers can convince some platform venues, that would never look at a self-pubbed author, to spotlight your book. For example, it’s unlikely a self-published author will be able to convince Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal, which have huge platform for library book purchasers, to review a book. But publishers have no problem getting their stuff in there. Likewise, it’s often much easier for publishers to get endorsements from other authors or people with platform than it is for a single author. Of course, there are so many places that have some kind of platform, that publishers don’t have a lock on them all, e.g. Goodreads and Amazon reader reviews. But for the sake of simplicity, let’s just look at the distribution end.
Because 90% of book sales are still hardcopy, the only way to have HUGE sales numbers, right now, is through a print publisher. I’m talking about the numbers you see in the Publishers Weekly top selling books, where you have to sell at least 100k copies in hard back, 500k copies in mass market, to even make the list.
Publisher’s lock on this ability will erode. We can see signs of this in the USA Today Top 150 already. I consider this to be the most accurate picture of what truly is selling the most. Here’s why. And ebooks are starting to be the best selling format for a number of books. On that list, they add up sales of a title in all formats and then list the best-selling format. So when you see an (E) at the end of the listing, you know it’s selling more ebooks than any other format. E’s are starting to pop up all over and we’re still in the early adopter stage for ebooks and ereaders.
So what does this mean?
If I put on my author business slacks (why does it always have to be hats we change?), I’d be crazy to turn down a publisher that wanted to offer me monster distribution. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. You offer me $500k now, I’m taking the money and running all the way to the bank and then the $6.99 Indian all-you-can-eat buffet.
Of course, I’m not likely to get that kind of an offer. We new writers are more likely to get an offer for, what were Hines’ numbers? $6k – $12k? And for that the publisher will want all our ebook rights and will tie them up for years and years and years. And then they’ll try to give us a fraction of what we could get selling directly. Furthermore, they don’t provide such books the same push to garner platform spotlight. They don’t spend the money to give them the prime display in bookstores. This means the difference between what they bring to the table for us smaller authors and what we can do on our own is much less. And the ebook has narrowed that even further.
How much further? Well, how many books would you have to sell to make that advance of $6k – $12k? If you’re selling your books for $2.99 for the Kindle, you get about $2.00 a book. That means you’d have to sell 3k-6k copies of an ebook to earn as much as that average advance.
Do you think you can sell 3k – 6k copies of an ebook at $2.99?
Some authors will be able to do this. Some won’t. If you wanted to do that in three years, you’d have to sell about 150-350 books per month. For a more in depth comparison between traditional publishing and self-publshing ebooks, see Dean Smith’s blog on cash flow.
Maybe you don’t think you can make those numbers. But maybe you can. The point is that if you think you can, then you can make as much on your own as you can with a publisher. This means there is absolutely no financial reason on earth to take the publisher’s deal. None. Now, if you have non-financial reasons, that’s another thing, but when looking at dollars and cents, it’s fairly clear the publisher’s ability to put you into their distribution channels isn’t worth what it will cost you. Especially since the ebook is forever and may keep selling for years to come AND because the market for ebooks is still in the early adopter phase–it’s only going to grow massively over these next years.
But this doesn’t mean paper publishing is dead. It’s not. Nor will it be for some time. Just because SOME authors can make as much in the ebook market on their own as they can with a publisher through their distribution channels doesn’t mean all of them can. Furthermore, publishers with distribution have something to offer even those who successfully publish ebooks themselves.
Let’s say you have an ebook series that starts to sell well for you, 1,000 per month. That’s $2k per month, $24k per year. If a publisher wanted to buy the rights to that from me, they would have to pay me MORE than $70k as an advance. MORE. Because I can make that on my own in three years selling it myself. In fact, since ebooks are forever, I have to look at the present value of all of those years of sales. That income stream is going to be a LOT MORE than $70k, even if we think sales will taper off after five or six years.
How many big publishers are going to want to pay that?
Probably none. Or, at least, I suspect those deals will be few and far between. But there is money to be made in paper, even if that market is shrinking. There will be some smaller publishers who, for the right price, will offer paper distribution. And if they can get me distribution that I couldn’t get myself for paper, or do it at a lower cost, then I’d want to sell them paper rights. Why not?
And so what I see in the crystal ball are some authors, the ones who do well selling ebooks, being able to sign contracts with publishers that sell paper rights only. I know the big publishers probably won’t go for that in the near term, but smaller publishers will see the value and step up to the plate.
AGENTS
What about agents? Are they going to die?
I think if we remember that literary agents are SALES agents, then their future becomes clear. The only reason to get a sales agent is because doing so makes my property worth more (same reason for getting a publisher, btw). If, by letting them focus on sales and letting me focus on getting more product out the door, I make more money than I would if I tried to do BOTH the selling and the producing, then I want an agent.
I want to sell as many rights as I can to as many people as possible–gaming, film, audio, foreign, merchandise, etc. I’d be a fool to say, well, no, I’ve got this little ebook gig going. I’m not going to sell any of these many other rights to anybody. No, I’m just going to let them sit in my basket and earn me nothing. Let them go to waste.
!?
A good agent should be able to sell more than I could on my own because they have a better ability to reach AND close editors AND other people that are in the market for purchasing rights to my property. They’ll also allow me to sell more because all the time I would have spent selling, I can now use to create more product. So not only do I have more books, and therefore rights, to sell, I can hopefully sell them for a better price and terms than I could on my own.
I’d be a fool not to increase my revenue. I’d be a fool not to have a good agent.
So as long as there are people who want to purchase these non-ebook rights, and an agent can make a sale I couldn’t or can make it for less than what it would cost me to do it on my own, then agents will be useful. Because of this, because we’ll always have more than ebook rights to sell, I don’t see a role for good agents ever going away.
EBOOK AGGREGATORS & LIBRARIES
When more and more people begin reading ebooks what happens to the libraries?
Ebooks cost less. So a lower price per book would simply allow libraries to purchase more books and expand the collection. But wait, they don’t need rooms and rooms to hold all the paper. You can store the world’s library in one computer room. Shoot, this means that housing the collection on a server instead of on the shelves would cost less. This would allow for an even bigger collection. But why maintain a server and manage your own collection if you can network to the collection down the road?
In fact, what if there were a mega service with millions of titles you could subscribe to? That would be even cheaper. Then you wouldn’t have to pay book purchasing agents or IT folks to keep your server running.
Enter the ebook aggregators–the Netflixes of ebooks (I know somebody somewhere is working on this business plan; is it you?)
I’m betting the whole library system goes national. I’m betting you’ll have some government aggregators, but they’ll probably be dwarfed by the private companies. You’d subscribe to the aggregator’s service just as you do Netflix today and many university libraries currently subscribe to electronic periodical collections.
The aggregators will probably charge users as Netflix does for a certain number of books checked out at the same time. If a large entity like a library wanted to subscribe, I bet the aggregator would charge access to the collection based on number of users at the library. The library would pass some of that fee onto patrons. The rest of the fee would be paid by the community’s tax dollars, just as those tax dollars pay for the current collections. You might even have device manufacturers coupling subscriptions with purchase of the product as incentives to buy their devices.
When the aggregators step in, we suddenly end up with a different mix of distribution channels that will coexist:
Surprised by #5? Well, the current distribution channels are not going away until every book can be read on an ereader and everyone who reads has and wants to read on such a device. That’s going to take some time, if it happens at all.
Why would readers buy individual titles ala distribution channel 1 above? Some people just want to own. Other readers will be happy to purchase the books because they don’t want to wait for a checkout slot to open up, e.g. I already have my allotted number of books checked out and I really want this one on hand all the time because it’s Suzie’s favorite. Other readers will want to customize a book with highlights, margin notes, links, etc. just as many of us like to mark up paper texts. We’ll need our own copy for that. Still, I think the bulk of reading will move to the subscriptions. For example, right now I purchase DVDs I love, even though I can get them from Netflix. But the number of DVD’s I own are a fraction of those I watch. Most TV and film I watch once and it goes back to Netflix until I want to see it again. And this checking out becomes even easier where there’s nothing physical to send through the mail.
Please note: there will probably be some form of gatekeeping with the aggregators. I doubt they will carry every scrap of anything ever written. They’ll carry a lot of stuff, but not every written word. Furthermore, when you have hundreds of thousands of titles, you’ll need mechanisms for helping your subscribers find great content suited to their tastes. A lot of “people who read this read that,” review services, etc.–the next generation of Netflix recommendations, Goodreads reviews, and Pandora like tools.
Aggregators won’t be the only gatekeepers, however. The key is in getting notice. And there will be many places with platform that will be able to shine a spotlight on a book. Think about all the places you find out about movies today—radio movie programs, TV movie reviews, Rotten Tomatoes, Newspaper Reviews, Yahoo viewer and critic review summaries, Kids-in-mind, and on and on. Look at all the ways you find music. There will be just as many ways to find books.
As far as paying authors, I suspect aggregators will pay authors each time a book is checked out, or, if it’s a must-have name author, they will pay to list the title plus a per use payment.
So that’s the future I saw in my strange little ball. Feel free to comment or add your own thoughts.
Folks, a huge thanks goes to Stephen Nelson for putting all this together. You may kiss his hand when you see him.
This is a recording of “How to Write a Story that Rocks,” a two-hour seminar Larry Correia and I just put on at the annual BYU’s Life, The Universe, & Everything symposium. I think we had 130-140 people attend. This symposium is focused on writing fiction. And while the panels and presentations do include things specific to the science fiction, horror, and fantasy genres (both adult and young adult), a lot of time is also spent on story writing fundamentals that apply to ALL genres. So when I developed this workshop, I made sure I took the fundamental approach.
The two-hour seminar has been broken down into 12 segments. To switch between the segments:
If you prefer, you can watch all 12 on the How to Write a Story that Rocks YouTube playlist page.
I’ve found whenever I develop any presentation or training that it takes a few iterations and revisions before it’s the best it can be. This is the first iteration of this seminar. And so below this video I’ve provided additional comments on each segment explaining key concepts, principles, and techniques that we might have failed to discuss or convey as clearly as we’d hoped. Enjoy!
How to Write a Story That Rocks – Handout
It’s documented–right-wing gun nut Larry Correia sang “Kumbaya.” What’s next? The hugging of small trees? Oh, Larry, the disilluion. The disillusion.
The reason why I had Larry sing was not for his mellifluous performance, but to demonstrate the difference in reactions between him and our happy volunteer (“Country Road” by John Denver–this really was a love fest). The volunteer balked because he hadn’t taken any thought to know what to sing before he was commanded to do so. On the other hand, Larry and I had spoken before the seminar. So Larry had something to sing BEFORE he sang it. It’s a simple demonstration, but it illustrates a principle a lot of new writers forget. Writing is a performance. It helps to know what it is you’re going to perform before you perform it.
It’s one thing for you to tell yourself to write. It’s much easier to tell yourself to write the scene where the rancher finds out one of his illegal ranch hands has been kidnapped.
Now this doesn’t mean that you have to know everything. Or that you can’t write exploratory drafts to figure out what it is you want to write. But it does illustrate that whatever techniques you use, you’ll be a lot more effective in your writing when you have something to say first.
But what do you develop? What are the things that bring the story to life? How do you go about getting those things to say? That’s precisely what I wanted to address in the seminar. In the segments that follow, I try to:
I think this segment went fairly well. What rocks will different from person to person, even though there will often be a huge overlap between people. So it’s important for authors to seek to develop the kinds of stories that rouse their passion. Watch this interview with best seller Debbie Macomber to see what I mean. So I can’t tell you what to write about. Or if whath you think rocks will resonate with a large number of people. However, what I can do is share the techniques I use that have been most productive in helping me develop initial ideas into something that has much more power.
You can use the techniques to juice up any of the four parts of story. However, I will say that I find that the most productive, the most important parts, are character and problem. Plot and setting are important. I love them and work to juice them up. But when I get a good character and problem, that’s when the writing seems to flow the easiest.
And no, I don’t list theme as a part of story. Everyone talks about theme, but when I read what they have to say or press them for examples, it seems that it always either boils down to (1) a story element or topic that’s repeated, (2) a story problem/issue stated in an abstract manner, or (3) some moral situation. Les Miserables is about the “theme” of mercy versus justice. But saying justice versus mercy is just an abstraction of the story problem and dilemmas the story deals with. So, no theme.
Loved this bit about scenes from David Mamet: http://www.slashfilm.com/2010/03/23/a-letter-from-david-mamet-to-the-writers-of-the-unit/
I’ll be adding my comments to the rest of these segments over the next few days.
Check it out: Dan Wells on How to Build a Story (story structure). I find Dan’s “start with the ending” technique helpful as well as thinking about a worst fears realized moment. Watch the videos and see if there isn’t something there that can help you develop your story idea.
You can get the PowerPoint of How to Build a Story on Dan’s site.
If you find this approach useful, you might want to check out what novelist Larry Brooks has written about the same material on StoryFix.com.
